Astronomers have gazed into what appears to be a planetary maternity ward, observing for the first time within a huge disk of dense gas and dust surrounding a newly formed star a planet in the process of being born. The discovery was made using the European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) and its SPHERE instrument. In 2019 and early 2020, astronomers from Belgium, France, Taiwan and the US obtained the deepest images of the AB Aurigae system to date. They confirmed past observations of spiral arms of gas and dust, and they discovered the critical twist, which is located about as far from the star as Neptune is from the Sun. They believe that the twist marks the spot of new planet forming. “The twist is expected from some theoretical models of planet formation,” co-author Anne Dutrey said in a statement. “It corresponds to the connection of two spirals — one winding inwards of the planet’s orbit, the other expanding outwards — which join at the planet location. They allow gas and dust from the disc to accrete onto the forming planet and make it grow.” “We should be able to see directly and more precisely how the dynamics of the gas contributes to the formation of planets,” said Anthony Boccaletti, who led the study. “It takes several million years for a planet to be in its final stage, so birth is not well defined in time. However, we can say that we were likely able to catch a planet in the process of formation,” said Observatoire de Paris astronomer Anthony Boccaletti, who led the research published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. More than 4,000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars beyond our solar system. Scientists are eager to learn more about how they are born as cold gas and dust consolidate in these disks surrounding new stars. The planet is located about 30 times further from its star than Earth’s distance from the sun – about the distance of the planet Neptune in our solar system, Boccaletti said. It appears to be a large gas planet, not a rocky planet like Earth or Mars, and may be more massive than our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter, Boccaletti added.